“Today this scripture has been fulfilled
in your hearing.” (Luke 4:21)
A lot of folks come to
church to feel good. Unfortunately, some occasions arise when we leave our
houses of worship feeling perplexed or challenged or—maybe—even a bit offended.
Hey! If Christianity were easy, don’t you think more people would be practicing
it?
The gospel lessons
appointed in the Revised Common Lectionary for Epiphany 3 and 4[i] might pitch a screaming
slider across the plate of some who hear them. Jesus isn’t afraid of a little
controversy.
When we pick up our
Lord’s story on Epiphany 3 and 4 Year C (Luke 4:14-30) he’s just gotten off to
a pretty good start. He’s been baptized by John the Baptist and declared God’s
beloved Son. He’s also just rebuked the temptations of the devil. Since John was
thrown in the slammer for calling out King Herod[ii], it looks like Jesus is
now the main prophet on the scene. He goes about preaching in synagogues and is
getting a really good reputation.
I’ll bet the good folks
in Nazareth were pretty darn proud of their local son whose star seems to be on
the rise. They let him preach in the synagogue where, taking his text from the
prophet Isaiah, he gives what we might consider his inaugural address. He reads
the prophet’s words which declare God’s Spirit commissions God’s people to lift
up the poor, release the captives, free people from oppression, and reset the
whole economy.
Jesus basically tells his
hometown crowd, “Yup. That’s what I’m here to do.”
A quick word about that
economic reset: The passage Jesus read was from Isaiah 61:1-2. The prophet was
referring to laws in the book of Leviticus (Leviticus 25:1-17) which required a
sabbatical year rest for farmland. This helped replenish the soil and was an
organic way to care for the land before the invention of nitrogen rich
fertilizer. The law further declared a fiftieth-year tradition of returning all
land to its original owners, and demanded fair sale prices for land, depending
on how close you were to that fiftieth year. This Jubilee[iii] was a good practice
ecologically and economically, but we have no way of knowing if the Jews ever
actually observed it.
Since all this stuff is
in the Bible, the people in the Nazareth synagogue didn’t seem to have any
trouble with it. I imagine they were all nodding their heads in agreement.
Maybe they were thinking, “Boy. Mary and Joseph’s son sure reads well. He might
go far yet.” But perhaps they didn’t quite get the point that Jesus had come to
rescue people on the outside of polite society. The mission statement he read
from the scroll of Isaiah was a call to compassion for people whom others might
not judge to be worthy.
If Jesus just kept his
mouth shut, he may have been invited to coffee hour after the service. But no.
He had to go and provoke the congregation. If you check out verses 23 and
following, Jesus points out that his hometown crowd gets no special treatment.
If they think they deserve the same healings and miracles Jesus performed in
Capernaum, they’re just out of luck. Jesus has come for the needy, not the
affluent, for the sick and not the well who have no need for a physician. He
then goes on to remind them of their own history and how the prophets Elijah
and Elisha performed miracles—feeding and healing—for foreigners.
Well that tore it. That
got the crowd really pissed off. Luke says they were “filled with rage,” and
dragged Jesus out of town with the intention of throwing him off a cliff. I
guess they couldn’t deal with the notion that Jesus was calling for grace and
compassion for other people—people who weren’t like them and, in their view,
probably didn’t deserve God’s abundant mercy.
I wonder sometimes if our
whole sinful society isn’t suffering from a bad case of wounded entitlement.
When Jesus declares his mission to proclaim good news to the poor and release
people from oppression, there’s a tendency for some people to ask, “But which
poor? Why are they poor? Isn’t it their own fault?” When confronted with
the suffering of others we might want to reply “I’ve done hard work
myself. I’ve gone without. I’ve suffered—so those people
can too.” Or we can respond “I’ve done hard work myself. I’ve gone without.
I’ve suffered—and I didn’t like it, and I hope others don’t have to endure it.”
It seems our sense of fairness is always at war with our call to compassion. We
fear someone might be taking advantage of us and we despise cheaters more than
we desire the wellbeing of all God’s people.
What would Jesus have us
do?
This past week, at the National
Ecumenical Prayer Service at the Washington National Cathedral, the Episcopal
Bishop of Washington DC, the Rt. Reverend Mariann Budde, asked the President of
the United States for mercy for those who are afraid—the LGBTQ+ community and
undocumented workers. I would consider these people to be under the heading of
the poor and the oppressed, the folks for whom Isaiah and Jesus seemed to be
concerned. I listened to the bishop’s gentle and sweetly phrased homily, and I
did not hear her scold or condemn the president. I only heard a plea that our government
should have some feelings for those on the margins.
But some folks got upset.
And that’s okay. Sometimes
our faith should challenge us. Sometimes we should wrestle with the practical
and the ideal, with what we feel we can do versus what our faith teaches us we should do. Sometimes we should reject simple, safe answers—especially when
we are followers of Jesus. And if our faith makes us uncomfortable at times, maybe it's because we're really learning how to live it.
Let me know what you
think.
[i]
Yes, I’m going to include the lesson for Epiphany 4 in this post. Why? My
congregation orders from the ELCA publishing house inserts for the Sunday
worship bulletins which contain the propers of the day and the appointed
lessons. If a certain saint’s day or other commemorative falls on a Sunday in
Ordinary Time (that is, during Epiphany or the Post-Pentecost seasons), we have
the option to observe either the commemorative or the numbered Sunday. The
subscription my congregation gets always has the lessons for the commemorative,
so we won’t be observing Epiphany 4 next Sunday, but we will celebrate the
Presentation of Our Lord.
[ii]
Luke 3:18-20
[iii]
Fun fact: The word Jubilee comes from the Hebrew word jubel, which means
a ram’s horn. The start of the fiftieth year was supposed to be marked by the
blowing of a trumpet made from such a horn.
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